BY MICHAEL R. SISAK (STAFF WRITER)
Published: July 5, 2010
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KRISTEN MULLEN / THE CITIZENS' VOICE Harun Ngolo is charged with criminal homicide in the death of his wife, Maria Ngolo, last month. Police said Harun fatally stabbed her with a makeshift spear during an argument.
Mark Moran / The Citizens' Voice A judge last week convicted Donnell Buckner of first-degree murder and ordered him to serve a mandatory life sentence for gunning down his wife, Kewaii Rogers-Bucker, in 2009.
The warning shot came six months before Kewaii Rogers-Buckner's death. Her husband Donnell, in the midst of an abusive fusillade that included threats to her life and promises to play Russian roulette, fired a bullet into a wall of their Wilkes-Barre bedroom.
The incident, documented in a protection from abuse petition, was a prelude to the fatal night last spring when Rogers-Buckner's husband shot and killed her within earshot of her three children - ages 12, 11 and 9 at the time.
The sequence, and violence-pocked relationship, appeared to mirror the abusive broadsides Harun Ngolo launched at his wife three years before her death last month at their Wilkes-Barre home.
Ngolo, an African immigrant, armed himself with a makeshift spear - a steak knife attached to a 3-foot metal pole in 2007 - and swung it at his wife in a foreshadowing to the episode prosecutors say ended her life.
The cases resemble countless others in which domestic violence turns deadly and the struggle battered women face when trying to maintain a normal home life while also sheltering themselves from abuse.
Between 2000 and 2007, at least 1,100 people died as a result of domestic violence in Pennsylvania, according to the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
Rogers-Buckner and Maria Jeringa Ngolo documented the violence in protection from abuse petitions, but both continued to live with their husbands after the gun and knife incidents, tied down by family and work obligations and fear of the strife that would come with a separation.
"We'll often hear people say, especially women, 'you know, he's not a bad guy,' 'when he's not drinking, everything's great' or 'when he's working, everything's great,'" Luzerne County District Attorney Jackie Musto Carroll said. "They hark back to that time when things were good and they hope they can get back there."
The good times often segue back to violence and, in cases like Rogers-Buckner's and Ngolo's, death. Both husbands violated the protection orders, Buckner the night he killed his wife and Ngolo multiple times in the years before prosecutors say he landed his fatal blows.
"They may have a family, they may live together and it's just very hard for them to get out of the situation and the person perpetually will say, 'maybe he's changing, maybe it's not so bad,' and it's easier to live with themselves if they can convince themselves things are going to be OK, but more often than not, something sparks an argument and it goes from there."
"If a woman goes out and obtains a PFA, it is so detrimental to her well-being to say, 'I know there's a PFA, but he's being nice to me today, he wants to take me to dinner, or he wants to take me to a movie, maybe I can ignore the PFA and it will be OK,'" Musto Carroll said. "Once a woman ignores the PFA, or the person who has the PFA ignores it, that gives the abuser a sense of empowerment and that's probably the worst thing that a person who has obtained a PFA can do."
The recent cases mirrored the pattern of increasing former Dallas Township police officer Jeffrey Dennis inflicted on his wife, Carli, before killing her inside their Wyoming home in February 2006. Dennis, convicted in October 2007, is serving a life sentence.
"That was a case where he tried to have total control over the victim's life," Musto Carroll said. "He felt she was slipping away and he was losing that control and he couldn't handle that."
Abusers often have little control over their own lives but find it easier to dominate the lives of another person, Musto Carroll said.
Finding a way out can be difficult, Musto Carroll said. Obtaining a protection from abuse order or seeing a divorce attorney can incite an already abusive spouse or partner to new and, in some instances, fatal levels of violence.
"That is a dangerous period because the violence can escalate," Musto Caroll said. "It's not an easy situation. There is no quick fix to it."
Picking up on small signs of control early in a relationship can mean the difference between a quick, relatively painless exit and a long-term relationship that can become complicated by marriage, children, financial needs and escalating levels of violence.
Abusers scrutinize and criticize small details of a partner's life, from what they wear and who they speak with to the works they use in conversation.
"It could be anything where the abuser feels he is losing control," Musto Carroll said. "If a woman is looking at a magazine and there's a picture of another man in a magazine, something like that could just trigger a jealous rage. It's hard to believe, but it's consuming. It consumes the victims."
In the Dennis case, witnesses described seeing physical signs of abuse that Carli would try to cover up "because she was embarrassed, she didn't want him to get any more angry with her," Musto Carroll said.
"You see it in a lot of cases where women may sometimes feel, 'it's my fault, I set him off. It's my fault, I shouldn't have smiled at that other person walking down the street, or I shouldn't have changed my hairstyle. It could be anything."
Musto Carroll's office and local law enforcement officers operate under a domestic violence protocol established in the mid-1990s. In 2008, when she took office, and in 2009, prosecutors provided training to the police officers in how to handle domestic violence crimes.
"Years ago you'd have people say things like, 'well, that's a family matter,' or 'that's not our business,' or 'they're our neighbors, but what goes on in their house we don't care about because that's up to them,'" Musto Carroll said. "We don't have that anymore. Thank God, it's getting better."
msisak@citizensvoice.com, 570-821-2061
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